The King of Confidence

I​N AUGUST OF 1843—TEN MONTHS BEFORE THAT ANGEL FLEW TO Wisconsin—a man from a small town in western New York vanished into the night.

Such disappearances were not uncommon in those days. The Panic of 1837—the deepest and longest-lasting economic crisis the young country had ever faced, to be rivaled only by the Great Depression a century later—had hurtled countless average Americans into sudden financial ruin. For some, the humiliating prospect of having the sheriff take possession of their goods and real estate to satisfy a creditor’s claim was simply too much to bear. As one Pennsylvania man who owed “two hundred and fifty dollars—gone I can’t tell where” put it in his 1842 suicide note: “I am gone and forgotten—numbered with the dead, where the creditors call upon me no more.”

But for others there was a way to end one’s miseries without putting a bullet in one’s brain, to lose one’s life without actually dying. For years, those who hoped to outrun creditors had sought refuge on the fast-expanding western frontier. The man who disappeared from the New York town of Randolph, sixty miles south of Buffalo, at the tail end of the summer of 1843 had faced mounting debts for years, putting off his creditors with increasingly ornate ruses, until at last his only hope was to get out of town. In many other periods of history, the missing man might never have been heard from again after his disappearance. But he lived in an era of sudden transformations, an era when you could be broke one day and rich the next, anonymous one day and famous the next, an era when wild dreams and lunatic fantasies could quickly metamorphose into hardened facts. At that exact moment in history, for example, as many as 50,000 followers of a prognosticating preacher named William Miller were convinced that the Second Coming of Christ would take place within the next seven months. Such a precarious time, when nothing felt stable or certain anymore, favored chameleons like the man who was no longer there.

Although he was physically unimposing—a few inches over five feet, and bald, with an oddly bulging forehead—he did possess one distinguishing feature: his dark brown eyes, which one acquaintance described as “rather small but very bright and piercing, giving an extremely animated expression to his whole countenance.” Another claimed that they seemed “as though they could bore right through a person.” But more than any tangible attribute, the vanished man possessed an invisible, ineffable aura called confidence. And in those days before electrical power, confidence was what made antebellum America hum. Confidence was black magic, good fortune, and hard cash combined. Confidence could turn worthless paper into glittering gold, cow towns into cities, empty lots into bustling businesses, losers into winners, paupers into millionaires. Confidence was a charm deployed by bankers and merchants, philosophers and politicians, clergymen and card sharps alike. Confidence was “the soul of trade,” in the words of a leading financial publication. Without it, added Herman Melville, “commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop.” In an age before the federal government began printing paper money, an age when people had to trust in privately issued bank notes—glorified IOUs—confidence was the de facto national currency.

But if the missing man’s gift for confidence enabled him to gain people’s trust, to make them believe the most absurd stories, it also got him into serious trouble. Just before dropping out of sight, he had allegedly attempted to pull off a swindle involving a farm he “pretended to own in the interior of Ohio,” in the words of one newspaper near his hometown. He managed to sell this nonexistent property to an unsuspecting purchaser, who then “removed to Ohio, but was unable to find the farm he had bought.” Finding no evidence that the seller owned any land in the county, the enraged buyer returned to New York, procured a warrant, and had him arrested. Shortly after being detained, however, the man reportedly escaped by making up “some excuse for he wished to step up stairs, and was permitted to do so, since which the officer has not seen him.” This fugitive’s name was James Jesse Strang, but the local paper had another sobriquet for him: “the greatest scoundrel in all the land.”

One day, his name would be on the lips of the president of the United States. But for the first thirty years of his life, Strang had lived an obscure existence in western New York, which in those decades was a place of seismic demographic shifts, dizzying social upheavals, and frenzied enthusiasms. What sparked these cultural explosions was the construction of the Erie Canal, one of the engineering marvels of the nineteenth century. Completed in 1825, this 363-mile ditch, chiseled by brute force through the rocky wilderness between Albany and Buffalo, connected the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River. In the days before the arrival of railroads, it allowed merchandise to move west and raw materials to flow east at a fraction of the previous time and cost, making New York City, which stood at the eastern end of the waterway, the financial capital of the United States. Perhaps even more important, the canal opened the vast interior west of the Appalachian Mountains to settlement. In the 1820s, as Strang was entering adolescence, no region of the United States saw a more rapid rise in population than that of western New York.

But the canal also became what historians have called a “psychic highway,” transporting migrants not just through space and time but into a kind of alternate universe where rigid traditions could lose their social form and moral clarity, radical ideas could be tested, unconventional lifestyles could be embraced, wild ambitions could be realized, and dark fears could run rampant over the collective imagination. Many of the great social movements of the nineteenth century—abolition, women’s suffrage, and temperance among them—were already taking root in the fertile intellectual soil of western New York. But the region was becoming even better known for its seething religious passions. So many different spiritual wildfires lit up the landscape that the place would become known as the Burned Over District. And for the first three decades of his life, James Strang was never far from the blistering heat of those flames.

His parents, Clement and Abigail Strang, were charter members of a Baptist church in Forestville, New York, where the young man was raised on a farm with his older brother, David, and his younger sister, Myraette. By the time he reached his late teens, the region had gained widespread fame as the scene of “the greatest revival of religion throughout the land that this country…ever witnessed,” in the words of the nationally famous itinerant preacher Charles Grandison Finney, who in 1830 and 1831 waged an epic evangelistic crusade in the Burned Over District. During six feverish months of nonstop preaching, proselytizing, and prayer meetings in Rochester, for example, Finney managed to convert 800 people. As one witness put it, “You could not go upon the streets and hear any conversation, except upon religion.”

But the Burned Over District also produced a more radical species of preacher—zealots with unconventional ideas and apocalyptic murmurings, men and women who founded their own sects, convinced that they alone spoke for God. In the summer of 1831, for instance, an erratic, unemployed carpenter named Robert Matthews received a divine revelation. Henceforth he would call himself Matthias the Prophet and preach of an imminent cataclysm, in which 1,800 years of Christian misrule would come to an end, “all real men” would enter paradise, and all disobedient wives and outspoken women would be damned, along with “clergymen, doctors and lawyers.” In some other age, this eccentric preacher—dressed in his trademark green frock coat, crimson sash, and tight pantaloons—might have been ridiculed, arrested, or institutionalized. But in an era when almost any oracular claim seemed possible, he soon found a devoted following.

“Here and there in the midst of American society you meet with men full of a fanatical and almost wild spiritualism, which hardly exists in Europe,” wrote the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the Burned Over District in 1831 as part of a nine-month tour that resulted in his landmark book, Democracy in America. “From time to time strange sects arise which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States.”

Yet of all the groups stumbling down “extraordinary paths,” none caused more of an uproar in the Burned Over District than Joseph Smith and his Latter-day Saints. Like many homespun holy men, Smith insisted that God spoke through him; unlike his competitors, however, he produced a massive sacred text to support his claim. The Book of Mormon told the story of a centuries-long fratricidal struggle between two branches of an ancient Israelite clan that fled Jerusalem just before the Babylonian captivity, eventually winding up in the Americas. One of those tribes (the idolatrous, dark-skinned Lamanites) subsequently wiped out the other (the righteous, fair-skinned Nephites), but not before a Nephite prophet named Mormon managed to compile the history of his doomed people on some golden plates. Left with the melancholy task of safeguarding this record of destruction, Mormon’s son and fellow scribe Moroni, the last Nephite survivor, buried the plates beneath a hill in what would one day become western New York, where they remained for 1,400 years until Joseph Smith unearthed them.

Smith’s translation of those plates, 588 pages long and selling for $1.25, finally rolled off the presses in 1830, the year James Strang turned seventeen. The initial reception to the book was brutal. The Rochester Daily Advertiser and Telegraph described it as a “blasphemous work” and a “fraud,” adding that “a viler imposition has never been practiced.” The Fredonia Censor, a paper published about ten miles from the Strang family farm, called Smith a “miserable impostor” and predicted that “the deluded followers of Jo Smith’s Bible speculation” would soon come to their senses “and reason [would] resume again.” Yet despite such forecasts of the sect’s early demise, Mormonism had by then found a fervent group of followers numbering in the hundreds in western New York.

Strang himself, however, was not among them. At the age of eighteen he wrote in his diary about a growing distaste for religion: “It is all a mere mock of sounds with me for I can no longer believe the nice speculative contradictions of our divine theologians of our age. Indeed it is a long time since I have really believed these dogmas.” Although he continued to take an active part in the local Baptist church and to “pray and talk on religious subjects,” he did so only “to please the people.” Already adept at dissembling, he believed not a word of what he professed. “I am,” he wrote, “a perfect atheist.”

This sense of standing apart from the normal flow of life, from other people, and even at times from himself was nothing new. It had been with Strang since a sickly childhood, when he once came so close to death that his parents made plans for his burial. For the rest of his life, he would feel “a kind of creeping sensation akin to terror” when he recalled that lonely existence: “Long weary days I sat upon the floor, thinking, thinking, thinking!…My mind wandered over fields that old men shrink from.” In those early days, he rarely attended school, and even when he did teachers paid him scant attention, convinced he was “scarcely more than idiotic.” But all that isolation, all that thinking, thinking, thinking, left him with an overwrought fantasy life. He began to imagine a new self, began to construct a future in which a lonely farm boy would inspire love and adulation, a youth small in stature would loom large, and an absolute nobody would become a legend.

My mind has always been filled with dreams of royalty and power.